Short guide in setting up Belarusian language support in Linux
console, X Window System, web-browsers, text editors, etc.
Charsets used in the setup are either windows-1251 or
iso-8859-5. Belarusian characters can also be found in
koi8-ub, koi8-c, koi8-ru and, of course, Unicode. Although
this HOWTO is Linux-specific, many advices are applicable to
other UNIX-like systems.

As for now, the choice is mainly between windows-1251 and
iso-8859-5. Windows-1251 provides compatibility with M$
Windows and it is is by far the most popular charset for
nearly all slavic languages. On the other side, iso-8859-5 is
better supported and easier to set up.

The present HOWTO will explain the use of both charsets in
parallel. Unless otherwise stated in the text, Belarusian
support package from
the bellinux page
contains all the files mentioned in the present HOWTO.

Windows-1251 support in the kernel is needed to visualize MS
Windows filenames in cyrillic while the console and X Window
system are localized in windows-1251. As latest FAT file
systems store filenames in Unicode, we have to define the
output charset of the Virtual File System layer and install
the support for windows-1251 in the kernel.

There is a patch for 2.2.14 kernels that is included in the
Belarusian support package. To apply the patch,

cd /path_to_your_kernel_source_tree

patch -p0 < patch_for_the_kernel.patch

Recompile and reinstall the kernel modules.
Refer to
Kernel-HOWTO
for the details.

Add

codepage=866,iocharset=microsoft-cp1251

to your mount options in order to get the filenames in
windows-1251.

To test the setup, execute

mount /dev/hda -t vfat -o codepage=866,iocharset=iso8859-5 /mnt/hda

as root. Of course, you should replace /dev/hda by the
name of your vfat partitions containing names in
cyrillic.

There is built-in support for iso-8859-5 in Linux kernel.
To enable iso-8859-5, make sure you compile this module
in the nls section of the kernel setup. Normally, iso-8859-5
is compiled by default and can be loaded either automatically
or by issuing

Belarusian locale is available in glibc 2.2 and later.
If you do not have the belarusian locale installed in
your system, you can compile it yourself. The source is
available at
the bellinux page.
Issue

Some cyrillic console fonts are in fact russian fonts and
lack many cyrillic characters. Fortunately, UniCyr fonts by
Vadinm Zhitnikov have all the glyphs from cp866, cp1251,
iso8859-5 and all printable symbols from koi8-r. Besides
the belarusian keyboard maps which you can find at the
the bellinux page
, other files are fairly standard and are available in most
linux distributions. To set up window-1251 in console,

This method has one serious drawback - you will loose all
pseudographic characters and, say, you Midnight Commander
will look somewhat naked. The second method described below
preserves all pseudographic characters:

Load UniCyr font

consolechars -f UniCyr_8x16

Load by2.kmap
keymap or
by.kmap

loadkeys by.kmap
loadkeys by2.kmap

Load Application-Charset Map iso05.acm

consolechars -m iso05

Beware that different Linux distributions have different
console-related packages -
console-tools or
kbd. Abovementioned scripts are meant
to work with console-tools which is by
far more popular.

Install ISO-8859-5 fonts for X Window and make sure they are
before other fonts in the fontpath. Refer to
Font-HOWTO
for details on how to install fonts.

Get the belarusian keyboard layout by from the
the bellinux page
and put it on the place of any other keyborad layout in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/, e.g.
instead of the belgian keyboard layout
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/be

Put the following stings in your
/etc/X11/XF86COnfig:

XkbModel "microsoft"
XkbLayout "be"
XkbOptions "grp:caps_toggle"

Don't forget to set up the system locale to
be_BY.ISO8859-5 as described in Section 2.4.
You will also want to make sure that iso-8859-5 fonts
are before any other fonts in your font path.

Install ISO-8859-5 fonts for X Window and make sure they
are before other fonts in the fontpath.

Get the belarusian keyboard layout by from the
the bellinux page
and put it on the place of any other keyborad layout in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/, e.g.
instead of the belgian keyboard layout
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/be

Put the following strings in your
/etc/X11/XF86Config:

XkbModel "microsoft"
XkbLayout "be"
XkbOptions "grp:caps_toggle"

Don't forget to set up the system locale to be_BY.CP1251
as described in Section 2.4.

To use windows-1251 with XFree 3.3.5 and 4.0, you have to
apply a patch from Aleksey Novodvorsky that allows the use
of windows-1251 with XKB. The original location is at
ftp.logic.ru/pub/logic/linux/be-locale
and it is also available from
the bellinux page.
Lucky users of Linux-Mandrake RE get a patched XFree86 out
of box.

Belarusian keyboard layout is palnned for all XFree releases
after 4.0.2. To make it work, you will have to add the
following lines
into /etc/X11/XF86Config:

Emacs is able to display Belarusian characters out of box in many
Linux distributions. However, the following conditions should satisfy:

Cyrillic iso-8859-5 fonts should be installed.

Emacs-mule package should be installed.

The user may want to change the default keyboard layout
("input method" in emacs slang) to jcuken. This
feature is provided by belarusian.el
along with some other goodies. Read the comments in the
beginning of belarusian.el for details
on the setup procedure.

After installing belarusian.el, you will
be able to switch the input method, by typing
C-\-cyrillic-belarusian-RET

For a more user-friendly setup, put the following lines in the
.emacs file:

It is often a problem to correctly visualize
Belarusian-specific characters with Netscape. This is due to
that Netscape 4.x looks for
any koi8-r font and, if it finds one,
they refuse to use other fonts for displaying Cyrillic pages.

The problem is solved by removing koi8-r fonts from everywhere - X
Window System font path and font server path.Then install koi8-ru,
iso-8859-5 or windows-1251 and run

xset fp rehash

or restart X server. You will probably have to delete
>preferences and
preferences.js from the Netscape home
directory .netscape and even then you are
not guaranteed to have Netscape work right. Netscape's
handling of fonts has always been an obscure issue.

Links to koi8-ru, iso-8859-5 and windows-1251 cyrillic fonts for X
Window System can be found at
the bellinux page

Mutt handles a multitude of charsets and encodings with ease. If your
console has windows-1251 support, add the following lines to your
.muttrc:

charset-hook "windows-1251" "cp1251" set charset="windows-1251"

Mutt automatically converts all incoming messages for the screen
output. It can also convert outgoing messages basing itself on a
versatile pattern matching mechanism, e.g. the following line in
.muttrc will force mutt to convert all messages sent to
be-locale@iatp.unibel.by to koi8-r.

A mailing list devoted entirely to Belarusian language support
is available at
be-locale@iatp.unibel.by.
To subscribe, send a message to
majordomo@iatp.unibel.by
with the string "subscribe be-locale youremailaddress"
in the body of the message